Friday, September 29, 2006

It’s come to something when the Polish Peasants Party (PSL) won’t talk about a coalition.

The government’s one real hope of putting back together a coalition suffered another blow last night when the Polish Peasants Party, who have 25 seats in parliament, broke off coalition talks saying that the ‘Polish Watergate ‘ tapes (see numerous posts below) showed that the government could not be trusted in its dealings over the allocating cabinet posts during negotiations.

So even the Peasants don’t want to get into bed with PiS, it appears. Which shows how bad the image of the government has become: in the past 17 years since parliamentary democracy began in Poland PSL have been known to get into bed with just about anyone if it meant a place in the coalition.

What happens next? The government says they will vote against Civic Platform’s motion to dissolve parliament on October 10. OK, turkeys can’t be expected to vote for Christmas, but if you don’t have a majority in parliament then you cannot get through vital legislation like the 2007 Budget Bill. And if you can’t do that then you are not a government, you are a party of lame ducks...

13 comments:

Are the Kaczynskis the latest politicians to run into serious shit because of their loyalty to the Bush agenda?

I haven't followed every burp and fart here, but it seems like the straw that broke the camel's back was the budget, namely Lepper simultaneously being told there wasn't money for social goodies while the government (in a bit of real bad timing) announced that whole 1000 soldiers to Afghanistan thing (at signficant cost to Poland) after W deigned to let the lesser duck into his presence for a whole five minutes.As Lepper put it "five minutes is supposed to cost us _that_ much?"

Well, indeed. I had a nice little post about this lined for this week (it is still hanging in the draft box) but well...events over took it. At a cost of 100 million dollars (which as I will show comes straight out of the defense budget) this was a kick in the teeth for Lepper.

Has PiS become another victim of the Bush factor, like the old Spanish government or Tony Blair? I don’t thunk so. Blair certainly is paying heavily for it, but I don’t think the Afghan issue is top of the list for Poles. For sure they don’t like it, but maybe this is more the straw that broke the Taliban camel’s back (if they have camels in Afghanistan which I am sure they probably don’t…)

Polish political whores is right the PSL certainly epitomizes that concept. But reference to George W. being the root cause of the duck demise would be a stretch. In their lust for power they went to bed with Lepper, if you put a viper in your bed and get bitten don’t be surprised. Lepper in a coalition was a grotesque miscalculation; playing Russian roulette with 5 of 6 chambers loaded provides better odds of survival.

Lepper had a chance govern he failed; Lepper told his followers that membership in the EU would be a disaster for them, farm income has doubled since. He has been wrong about virtually every policy direction he ever suggested.

The situation of sending military support for US efforts across the globe will not change with any combination of parties ruling Poland. There exists no serious believe that viable security can be attained through a purely European defence mechanism, when there is no faith in Germany and France coming to Poland aid in a security crisis. The current Nato mechanism is also deeply flawed with respect to Poland. Therefore a more direct relationship between American and the UK are deemed desirable.

Australia is a typical example of this strategy; it sends troops to virtually every American adventure in order to assure its security when it knows it cannot defend itself.

The ducks are sinking in the murky pond of Polish politics because they took the easy way out, as is European tradition. Form a minority government at the first opportunity and govern. This is always easier than the massive amount of political work that’s required to mobilize support for a viable majority. It’s starting to be clear that electoral laws need to be changed in order to increase the potential for single party governance. This would make sense in a country that has a weak tradition of forming political consensus, an art well understood in old democracies.

Back to the duck pond, when they sent their underling to get a few defections organized possible they shouldn’t of sent the village idiot to negotiate. Since apparently he was going to organize paying this “IOU” the Samoobron people had to sign. Maybe a simple legal opinion would have saved a lot of problems as it is likely no such contract can be made enforceable therefore no issue of money.

Hunting in Europe is not widely accepted by the masses as politically correct however don’t duck hunters shoot the mentally slower and less alert ducks first.

Ideological principles? There are differences between PO and Pis. I think it’s, at root, class politics. PO loves free market because they do represent middle class and those you have done well since 1989 and those who aspire to do well. PiS (and LPR, Samoobrona) represent the losers and those who think the new capitalism is as ungodly as the old communism.

According to an article by Wojciech Kosc in Transitions On Line (http://www.tol.cz):

"But while Giertych's crusade against homosexuals and advocacy of student patriotism are controversial, his efforts against pornography in the schools should have been less controversial. But he has become such a divisive figure that even an apparently well-intentioned effort to install porn-blocking software on school computers was ridiculed in the media.

Gazeta Wyborcza recently reported, for example, that the filters block all blogs but not neo-Nazi websites."